Listening. Speaking. Writing.

About

Dr. David Hyland-Wood is a multi-disciplinary engineer based in Brisbane, Australia. He has contributed to the evolution of the World Wide Web since 1999, especially in the formation of standards and technologies for the Semantic Web. He has architected key aspects of the Web to include the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) service and several Semantic Web databases and frameworks.

In his eclectic career, David has been a ship’s navigator, deep sea salvage engineer, aerospace engineer, university researcher and serial entrepreneur.

David contributed to several spacecraft designs, including thermal control system design to the original Iridium satellite prototypes, data reduction on the results of the Long Duration Exposure Facility, materials analysis for the Magellan mission to map Venus (while seconded from the U.S. Navy to JPL), and several U.S. Navy spacecraft.

As a deep sea salvage engineer, he was responsible for the salvage plan that lifted MV Wendy, now a popular recreational dive site in Honduras, a World War II victory ship now a recreational dive site in Puerto Rico, and SR-71A serial number 61-7974, lost off the Northern Philippines on 21 April 1989. He qualified as an Australian commercial diver to serve as dive supervisor on the 1998 underwater archaeology expedition to the HMS Pandora, where he was one of the first two divers to uncover the natural history collection in the surgeon's cabin.

David has co-founded three software startup companies and one hardware startup. Tucana Technologies produced the first commercial and scalable graph database. The company was sold to Northrup Grumman Electronic Systems in 2005. Tucana's query language was used as input into the development of SPARQL, the world's first international standard for graph query languages. The boutique software consultancy Zepheira and 3 Round Stones, a data management provider, are still operating.